Pickle points to where we live.
Teachable moments are given to us all the time, if we only take the opportunity. Sometime it takes a little bit of preplanning and patience to wait for the right moment. Take, for instance, our geography conversation at breakfast today. Sometime one simply placed prompt can be the door to open a conversation that covers Language Arts, Math, Social Studies, and Science!
We have a laminated (store bought) place mat on the table in preparation for the Olympics later this month. I am mainly using it to reinforce where we live on the Earth. Pickle knows what a globe is and that a globe is the same as the Earth, but is having difficulty understanding the Earth can be shown as a flat surface. (It doesn’t help that Antartica is shown next to Argentina on the flat map, and that every country is a different colour than our globe!) He also is confused about pointing to the United States as the place we live since it does not look like our home state; our flat map does not have individual state outlines.
At breakfast, he pointed to Russia and asked what it was. This led to a point-and-tell geography game. (This was most difficult for his geography-challenged mother, but I am determined he will be fluent in geography!) To model how to learn, I showed him how each country name is listed on the bottom of the flat map with a corresponding number, and sometime mom didn’t know all the answers either! I freely admit having to look up Bhutan on the index. After this stump-mommy-with-geography game, I then asked him to show me where Meme and Poppy live in Oklahoma. This prompted him to tell me a fantastic story about how he and Aunt Courtney took her dog and traveled to Mexico. Naturally, this led me to ask where Mexico was, and could he show me? I kept the conversation focused on geography.
Which turned into me asking if he knew where Granny and Auntie Chris live in England? And where our penpals live in France, Australia, and Isreal? We then traced each place back to where we live to see how far each place is from us. Which one is farthest on this map?
Is this Texas?
He then pointed to the Compass Rose; what country is this? This prompted a discussion on directions. Is Oklahoma North or South of Mexico? Is England East or West of France? Then he discovered Antartica! I had to pull out the globe to show him it really is on the bottom of the Earth. He became very interested in the circular latitude lines around Antartica on the bottom of our map, and I had to break it to him these were not really at the bottom of the earth. We studied Antartica at the Science Place this past year, so I reminded him penguins live there. Did he remember making a penguin? It is so cold on the bottom of the Earth that scientists have food parachuted to them. Wasn’t it fun making a parachute and throwing it off the balcony? It is important to me to bring learning back to a point of something concrete a young child can understand.
All-in-all, our little lesson took about 15 or 20 minutes: it was child-directed, answered the questions he had at that moment in time, showed him how to get information, covered a little of the core subjects, and reinforced what I wanted to teach (where we live on the map). I kept it light and didn’t force learning. The result is that he absorbed a great deal of information in a short amount of time. This week when we are out, I will make sure I incorporate directions into our conversations to reinforce the Compass Rose.
What do you do to incorporate geography into learning?
playfulyetplanned 